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Aleksandar
Hemon can write a pretty paragraph easily enough.
One
morning in Chicago I had tiptoed to the kitchen with the
intention of making some coffee. While customarily spilling
coffee grounds all over the counter, I spotted a can in
the corner whose red label read SADNESS. Was there so
much of it they could can it and sell it? A bolt of pain
went through my intestines before I realized that it was
not SADNESS but SARDINES. It was too late for recovery,
for sadness was now the dark matter in the universe of
still objects around me: the salt and pepper shakers,
the honey jar; the bag of sun-dried tomatoes; the blunt
knife; a desiccated loaf of bread; the two coffee cups,
waiting. My country's main exports are stolen cars and
sadness.
But as
The Lazarus Project shows, he'd rather tell a complicated
story about murder, mortality, xenophobia, and the power of
narrative. In 1903, Lazarus Averbuch fled the pogroms in his
native Russian village and immigrated to Chicago. He didn't
fit in. He flirted with severe poverty and the violent populism
of the anarchist movement. In 1908 he was shot dead, under
strange circumstances, in the living room of the chief of
police. Aleksandar takes that story, which is based on true
events, and augments it with the story of Vladimir Brik, a
writer who is researching the history of Lazarus Averbuch
in the present day in order to write a novel about him.
The lives
of Brik and Lazarus echo each other, both thematically (murder,
xenophobia, and the nature of storytelling) and literally
(names and phrases that reappear in startling combinations).
But these echoes are more frustrating than revealing. Those
who expect Brik and Lazarus to be reconciled by some kind
of literary magic will be disappointed. Brik is modern, Christian,
and Bosnian-American, while Lazarus is antique, Jewish, and
defiantly Russian. Brik says:
I
wanted my future book to be about the immigrant who escaped
the pogrom in Kishinev and came to Chicago only to be
shot by the Chicago chief of police. […] I had to admit
that I identified easily with those travails: lousy jobs,
lousier tenements, the acquisition of language, the logistics
of survival, the ennoblement of self-fashioning. It seemed
to me I knew what constituted the world, what mattered
in it. But when I wrote about it, however, all I could
produce was a costumed parade of paper cutouts performing
acts of highly symbolic value: tearing up at the sight
of the Statue of Liberty, throwing the lice-infested Old
Country clothes on the sacrificial pyre of a new identity,
coughing up consumptive blood in large, poignant clots.
As the
novel develops, Lazarus becomes a martyr and a lightning rod
in the ongoing war between the immigrants and rulers of Chicago.
Brik makes a journey to Eastern Europe for his research, and
he brings along a killer, thief, and photographer who happens
to be his childhood friend. Nothing is answered. The big questions
are always under review. All that is certain is that vanished
people are impossible to ignore—and to comprehend.
When
reading Hemon, it's easy to be reminded of Joseph Conrad (for
his foreigner's acute sense of the English language), Vladimir
Nabokov (for his love of games and unsolved mysteries), and
Saul Bellow (for his emotional portraits of old-fashioned
American strivers). But this is the work of a writer coming
into his own. He arranges absurd digressions and anecdotes
in patterns that do not need to be explained. He forgoes an
exploration of the injustices of the past and focuses instead
on bigger ideas—trauma, mortality, the difficulty of
finding a real human connection. Hemon's confessional, journalistic
approach to the subject of ancestral suffering makes the magical
realism of Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated
appear kitschy and unfounded by comparison. Because Hemon
opens up his work to include all of his own obsessions, he
can apparently write about anything at all and still be on
message.
Although
it's hard to fault Hemon's wordplay, which is alternately
dead-on and serendipitously offbeat, some of his minor characters
are too hastily drawn. Villains like the Chicago police of
1908 are almost gleefully evil, and female characters are
often cast in the role of the sexual victim. If The Lazarus
Project were a more conventional story, this sort of two-dimensionality
might undermine it. But Hemon is not afraid to direct "a costumed
parade of paper cutouts" once in a while, as long as it drives
at the heart of the single, complicated truth that he is pursuing.
Lazarus
speedily wrote down notes, as though the speech were a
dictation, while Isador daydreamed, hardly listening,
ogling the bespectacled stenographer. "But what about
the lives that we could live, the lives that cease to
be an endless, mad drudgery, repugnant struggles?" the
speaker went on. "What about the lives worth living? We
need new stories, friends, we need better storytellers.
We are tired of the preponderance of lies." Afterwards,
Lazarus remained in his seat, as the hall was emptying,
still struck by the intensity of the speech, by the thoughts
that raced through his head as he took notes. I want to
write a book, he said to Isador. Don't we all, Isador
said. But I am going to write it, Lazarus said. Just watch
me. I am going to write it.
(May,
2008)
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